Eric Musselman's Basketball Notebook

Friday, March 20, 2009

If you've found just one item of value on this blog over the last year or so, then it's been worth it. I've certainly enjoyed it. Even more, I've enjoyed interacting with so many great coaches, managers, and friends all over the world.

For me, the blog was about sharing items that coaches and leaders might find meaningful or worthy or constructive. In many cases, it was something that someone had shared with me first. After all, that's the nature of coaching.

Nearly all of the posts here have included at least one quote. This one will be no different. It comes from a blog reader who passed it along to me recently:

“The greatest difficulty with the worldis not its ability to produce,but the unwillingness to share.”

"We played a different type of game (at Memphis)," Douglas-Roberts said. "It was more open offense, and there's a lot more sets in the NBA. So I just go over everything. I watch a lot of film. This is my job now. So I spend the majority of my time on basketball. You have to be mentally strong, but I'm not the first rookie to go through this. There've been plenty of rookies who had to pay their dues and later in their career, they became stars. So I just look at it like that. I'm always positive. I stay positive."

On a team with Joe Johnson, Josh Smith and Mike Bibby, Horford has evolved into arguably the Hawks’ most indispensable player. Horford is different because he’s leading and he’s not the Hawks’ offensive centerpiece, like Chris Paul in New Orleans or LeBron James in Cleveland. He’s different because he’s 23 years old, and not nearly acting his age. He’s different because he’s a second-year pro and leading this team —- often by example, sometimes by his words, even in the face of a veteran teammate.

Veteran Joe Johnson contends that guys like Horford are rare: “Only a very small percentage of young guys can come into this league and lead. The ones who do usually are the focal point of their team. Al’s different.”

"If I see that somebody is not necessarily putting in the effort or is slacking off and it’s noticeable, I’m going to say something. I did it at Florida when I felt I had to. I did it in high school. Here, I’ve done it a couple of times. Usually I’m very mellow. But sometimes I think something needs to be said, even if I put it out there in front of the whole team, even to the point where the guys might be mad at me for a day or two. I think it’s for the best.”

'They got down and disgruntled ... I think it's just the idea that 'nothing's really gone well for me lately, and how am I going to get this going the right way?' Forcing it when it shouldn't be forced, or being too passive when you probably should step up and play harder, or with more aggression. Those are things that we're dealing with."

According to veteran PG Derek Fisher, despite winning 54 games thus far, there is a sense of frustration in the locker room.

"This is real," he said. "It's not a soap opera. So when you're part of a group, part of a team, you have to respect the fact that guys are going to have different, I don't want to say agendas, but just different things you go through. I know we've had a great season thus far, but we want so much more. That's where the frustration is coming from. There's probably not any other team that's frustrated with a 54-14 record, but we know what the end goal is."

"It is neutralized in the playoffs, pretty much," Cousy said from Florida in a telephone interview. "In the playoffs, any player worth his salt comes to play wherever the game is. Of course, you would rather have home-court advantage, but it's easier to overcome in the playoffs than the regular season."

On LeBron and Kobe:

"LeBron is a great one, but the other guys have got to beat you," Cousy said. "They can put two, three, four guys on him and force the other guys to beat you; and when you aren't used to doing it, you can't imagine the pressure. A great player thrives under pressure, a mediocre one collapses. All year long, LeBron has been carrying you, now I'm supposed to hit wide-open shots. And it's the same with LA, to some degree. Kobe is great, but still, in my judgment, there is a lack of defense. Kobe is a good defender, but I don't see improvement on the defensive end. It's a tossup, those three teams."

On Coach Rivers:

"Doc maintains as good a relationship with the guys as any coach in the league," Cousy said. "There is a lot of nodding the head affirmatively, I love you, and yes all the time, but Doc's not that. He's a friend in need but not their buddy. It requires a certain amount of discipline and they know Doc will be there if they need him, and that creates a bond."

"Basketball was always my savior. You know how a VCR always has to be on channel 3 to get a clear picture? Well, I was like a VCR: I had to be on the basketball channel to stay focused. If I switched to another channel, things got blurry."

"Stay the course. Trust the course. Don't forget what you're doing," Thompson told Broadus. "Put the blinders on. Don't listen to the outside folks. They want you to listen. They want to bring you down."

"I never forgot," Borha said. "He did his work, believed in us, thought we could win. That's when I knew we were going to be a good team."

An interesting change Coach Boylen made was to remove the players' names from the back of the home jerseys and replace them with "UTAH."

Says one player: "He let everybody know it's more about the team and more about the program than individuals.

In addition, "down the side of the team's home shorts, starting with Boylen's first year, was placed its new slogan — "U, Us and the Muss." "The U is local parlance for the school; Us is for the team; and The Muss is for the student section. The Mighty Utah Student Section takes its name from a line in the school fight song, "Utah Man" — "No other gang of college men dare meet us in the muss."

Loved how Memphis coach John Calipari turned over practice to forward Robert Dozier the other day in a move designed to force the quiet senior to take more of a leadership role with the team.

As this article describes, "Calipari left the gym, leaving Dozier on his own to coach."

"He thinks I'm too quiet," Dozier says. "He wanted me to be vocal, get on guys and be more of a leader. I was mad at first, because I didn't want to do it. But I had fun with it. The guys enjoyed it. It wasn't a long practice." The usually subdued Dozier said he tried to get as animated as Calipari, a dynamic, demonstrative speechmaker never at a loss for words. "I had to tone it down," Dozier says, laughing. "There were a lot of people in there."

If you're wondering why, at a Memphis practice, "there were a lot of people in there," it's because Coach Cal opens nearly all of the Tigers' practices to the public.

Retired folks stop in with their grandchildren; a postman comes by after finishing his route. For many elite programs, open practices were long abandoned in an Internet age when word can spread fast to rivals about a team's offensive and defensive schemes or a frustrated coach can show up on YouTube for pitching a fit. Calipari shrugs off those possibilities but notes he keeps some practices closed during the NCAA tournament.

Says Coach Cal: "I don't have anything to hide. You've got people, their lives seem to be this basketball program. They come to practice four or five times a week. They're able to get on the phone and talk to friends about what we're working on."

After his team lost the national championship game last season, Coach Cal was criticized for not having his players properly prepared.

"Either you use an experience to help build you and make you better and stronger, or the experience breaks you," he says. "That experience ... it did nothing except good stuff for us. None of it was bad."

Continue to work through Joe Torre's book, "The Yankee Years." There's a good excerpt that ties into a post from yesterday from Jeffrey Gitomer's book about trust.

Torre took over a Yankee team that had "played under the tightly wound [Bucky] Showalter, who had played, coached, and managed so long in the Yankees organization, where Steinbrenner's divide-and-conquer style of leadership was designed to keep everyone uncomfortable, that trust did not come easily to him."

In 1996, when Torre was named manager of the team, "they had a tast of the playoffs," Torre said, "and I think they were grown up enough to know somebody has to make the decisions. Whether you like me or believe me, you have to understand that. They were at the point where they knew in order to win we have to work together. And somebody has to point us in that direction."

I pulled the following from page 10 of the book:

~~~~~~~~~~

Torre provided a complete contrast to Showalter's micromanagement style. He gave his coaches and players a wide berth. One word kept coming up over and over again in the application of his management philosophy: trust.

"What I try to do is treat everybody fairly," Torre said. "It doesn't mean I treat everybody the same. But everybody deserves a fair shake. That's the only right thing to do. I'd rather be wrong trusting somebody than never trusting them."

"I'm of the belief that the game belongs to the players, and you have to facilitate that the best you can. I want them to use their natural ability. If they're doing something wrong, you tell them, but I'd like it to be instructive, rather than robotic. The only thing I want them all to think about is what our goal is and what the at-bats are supposed to represent. And that simply is this: 'What can I do to help us win a game?'"

Players quickly bought into Torre's management-by-trust style, and they did so because its abiding principle was honesty.

"Honesty is important to me. Where does it come from? I don't know, but even when I think back it was always something that was ingrained in me. Even now I may have trouble when I have to tell someone the truth if it's not a pleasant thing, but I won't lie to them. I can't do that. The only way you can get commitment is through trust, and you've got to earn that trust."

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

"What makes one guy a champion and the other one not?" [Walters] asked.

Schwarzenegger:

"It's drive. It's the will. There are certain people that grow up with a tremendous hunger and it's usually kids that have struggled when they were young. When you grow up comfortable and in peace and happiness, all those things will produce a very balanced person and a good person, but it will not create the will and determination and hunger that you need to be the best in the world."

In HOU, Aaron Brooks is experiencing some growing pains now that he's moved into the starting PG position.

In his words, "it's a little bit of a burden."

While Brooks is settling into his role, he does not fit into the traditional point guard mold, someone who looks to set the table. Without Tracy McGrady in the lineup — especially at the end of games — Brooks is the primary creator. That means he’s going to be more offensive-minded, because that is what is required of him.

What leaps out are games such as Saturday’s, when Brooks played 31½ minutes, took 18 shots and did not deal a single assist.

According to teammate Shane Battier, for Brooks, "the next step for him is to find a way to use his speed to make his people better. It’s part of the maturation process, and you can’t rush it. It’s called growing up. It’s called living."

Posted recently about Derek Fisher and Stephon Marbury's workout routines. Today, I see a note about how Shaq has changed his fitness regimen.

Before a recent game, "he did 200 sit-ups and 200 push-ups in a concrete corner, an area more suited for 200 crates."

That does not even count the times the Suns center bench-pressed strength-and-conditioning coach Erik Phillips in the locker room before scoring 26 points in a 154-130 win at Golden State.

According to this article, "O'Neal is doing more off and on the court than expected of the NBA's fifth-oldest player. He comes to US Airways Center on off-nights for workouts or free-throw practice and has joined Jared Dudley on 'the (Steve) Nash diet - no meat, no sugar, no starch, no soda, no nothing.'"

"The biggest misnomer is the fact that everybody says we can't play [uptempo] with Shaq," Suns coach Alvin Gentry said. "We can play that way with Shaq because he allows us to run and take quick shots. But when there are dead-ball situations, we're able to throw the ball inside. We have the best of both worlds. We can be an up-tempo team and have the most-dominant big guy to ever play the game."

O'Neal says PHX trainers found that "a posterior muscle... was not 'firing.'"

"I thought I was done (last season) because those doctors didn't know what was going on," O'Neal said. "When I got here, it wasn't even a hip problem. Those guys, Nellie and Mike Clark, they saved me."

As he's done from time to time this season, DAL coach Rick Carlisle "hatched a surprise" recently against the Lakers -- a zone defense that "caused confusion" and "bog[ged] down the Lakers offense."

"We hadn't seen a zone for a long time and it came out of nowhere," Vujacic said Monday. "For 60 games teams played man-to-man against us. No team played zone."

LA won the game, but the zone worked for time, as "the Lakers offense went stagnant."

"When the zone got sprung on [the second unit], they had that hesitation and ended up shooting nine 3-pointers that didn't go in," Coach Phil Jackson said. "That was a loss of focus because they lost the function of basketball, which is penetration."

To prepare for the next time they face a zone, "the Lakers spent the majority of Monday's two-hour practice working on the principles of their zone offense. The focus was on the best ways to attack a zone, which include moving the basketball to make the zone shift, making sharp cuts without the ball, and maintaining proper spacing."

"After he watched for the season's opening month, he has become a valuable, contributing member of coach Kevin McHale's rotation, playing as many as 35 minutes Friday against New York when his team had about seven healthy bodies."

As evident from this quote, one of Cardinal's strengths is his attitude:

"It's tough to just sit over there and watch, but I knew at some point in time something was going to happen because that's just how this league is," Cardinal said. "It's crazy: Some days, you play. Some days, you don't. Sometimes, your number is called. Sometimes, it's not. You have to be ready at all times. I'm just lucky Mac has had some faith in me."

According to the Star-Tribute article, when they traded for him, "the Wolves... received a veteran who didn't complain when he didn't play and who has contributed with his defense, his ability to make the right play and even with his three-point shooting, whether he plays five minutes or 35. He has made seven three-pointers in the past three games."

"The last game, he had three steals, and he took three charges," [Coach] McHale said. "That's six possessions. That's huge."

Cardinal is one of those rare NBA role players who, as Dr. J said here, understands his role and is happy to be in the league. Cardinal is first to acknowledge that he's "heavy on will and seemingly light on skill."

"I'm not the greatest of athletes, the greatest of jumpers," he said. "The list of things I'm not very good at goes on and on. I try to make up for that with hard work and just knowing the game. I try to make people somewhat uncomfortable. Anytime you're in your comfort zone, you're at your best. So I try to make the other guy uncomfortable."

Mike Montgomery is in his first season as head coach at Cal but he "guided Stanford to 12 NCAA appearances including the 1998 Final Four."

To get his Cal players excited about the tourney, "after the team's regular season had concluded at Arizona State, Montgomery assembled his players. He showed them a video about the NCAA tournament, featuring big moments and big plays. Montgomery then spoke of his own March Madness experiences to a locker room in which 10 of the 15 players had never been on the court in an NCAA game."

"I told them," Montgomery said, "how they don't understand how hard it is to win in the tournament, how they don't have any idea yet how big a deal this is. It's something you'll look back on and you need to cherish it. I talked to them about the heartbreak that can happen when you give it everything and sell your souls out and still lose — but how it's all worth it."

"He got a little emotional about it,'' point guard Jerome Randle said. "He was talking about the memories you can have, about how once you get there, anything can happen. It's a serious deal for him."

Found a great little book by Jeffrey Gitomer the other day titled "Jeffrey Gitomer's Little Teal Book of Trust." It's only a couple of hundred pages, but it's a wonderful book -- one that I'd consider giving to other coaches and players.

Here's a good excerpt from the first part of Gitomer's book:

~~~~~~~~~~

Have you ever looked back at a decision you made and scolded yourself, almost punished yourself, for making the wrong decision or realizing you could have made a better decision?

Monday-morning quarterbacks are always correct. They see what could have been done or should have been done on Sunday, and talk about it on Monday as though they could have gone back to Sunday and done it themselves.

People who go back and chastise themselves, or second-guess themselves, for making a wrong decision continue to set themselves up for failure in future decisions simply because they don't trust themselves.

I maintain that your judgment should always be trusted and never be second-guessed. That doesn't mean you won't make errors. That's why they call it judgment.

But I'm challenging you to look at incorrect decisions as lessons, life's lessons.

Mistakes in judgement are the best teachers in the world, and if you choose to learn from them, then you will begin to trust yourself and understand that, correct or incorrect, you were decisive and moved on.

Oh, you may rely on others. Oh, you may be dependent on others. But reliance and dependence are mutually exclusive of trust.

In order to build trust and become a trusted advisor to others, you have to first trust yourself. This means you have to trust your thinking, your wisdom, your knowledge, your judgment, your instincts, your powers of observation,your powers of dedication, your ability to reason, and your ability to discern.

You must be decisive. Trusted people are not wishy-washy. Trusted people do not pass the buck. Trusted people are willing to bet on themselves. It's not "trust me." It's "trust yourself."

What was it about Jeter that enabled him to succeed in clutch situations? He was comfortable with himself. There were never doubts about who he was or what the mission was all about.

"I'm an optimist by nature," Jeter said. "That's why when it comes to any negative stuff, I don't like to hear about it. I don't like to read about it. I don't like to know about it. I try to be positive."

Such a strong belief in a positive outcome sustains Jeter, lifts him above any self-doubt or any awareness of the consequences of failure. It is a characteristic he brought to the Yankees as a 21-year-old rookie, not a vestige of the big leauge experience he gained.

Teammates tapped into that quality immediately. If you're looking for someone to follow, why not follow the one who is sure the outcome of the journey will be positive? Why not follow someone, even a kid in his first full year in the big leagues, who stays cool at all times, who is unfamiliar with worry and anxiety?

Monday, March 16, 2009

"I thought we had perhaps a better killer instinct earlier in the year, if you can use that term," Jackson said. "I'm not fond of it, but when we had a team [down] 15, we'd try to extend it to 25 and tried to take the heart out of teams earlier in the year. Right now, I think that we've kind of played around with teams at times and allowed them to stay around in games and this is one of them."

There was a moment late in yesterday's game. There was less than a minute on the clock, and Duke was inbounding the ball on the baseline near Maryland's bench. Williams stood just a few feet away from where the play would begin, his eyes and attention focused on Landon Milbourne, who was guarding the inbound passer.

Good note here about how USC's turnaround began "two weeks ago during a film session before a game against Oregon, when assistant coach Phil Johnson (pictured here) had a harsh assessment of the team."

"He got up and told us we were not a tough team and it was time to show people how tough USC was," guard Daniel Hackett said. "We did by winning five consecutive games."

"Coach Johnson is like Papa Angry," forward Taj Gibson said. "He doesn't say much often, but when he lashes out, it wakes you up. He turned off the Oregon film and just said, 'You think you're tough, but are you really tough?' Guys snapped out of it."

USC swept Oregon and Oregon State to finish the regular season.

"We took that as a challenge," guard Dwight Lewis said. "Someone saying you're not tough, when you know you are? We wanted to prove we were a tough team and we had heart."

When asked about his team's toughness," USC coach Tim Floyd said:

"They can kill you, but they can't eat you. Obviously, when you had to take the path we had to take to get there, you're just thrilled to be in this field," Floyd said. But, he added, "At this point, that's yesterday's news. Put the DVD your mama made under the bed and start getting ready for the next one, Boston College."

Bowling Green's AD Greg Christopher has a list traits he looks for when hiring a coach. It's the same list he used when he hired Louis Orr (pictured here) last year to coach the BGSU hoops team.

Any coach he hires must...

-- Exhibit absolute integrity and high character.-- Have a solid reputation of success and work ethic.-- Show a passion to recruit and evaluate talent.-- Work as a team member in an 18-sport athletic department.-- Commit to his or her players' academics.

"If they don't have one of those things on that list, they won't be considered for the position," Christopher said.

According to this post of Hoops Coach, what helped Coach Orr "separate from other candidates was his success at Seton Hall."

Interesting thoughts from the late Bill Walsh in David Harris' book "The Genius" about how he formed his coaching philosophy.

~~~~~~~~~~

"[When he began his coaching career], there was this religion of 'toughness' in coaching circles those days and all coaches were trying to be like marine drill sergeants and scare people into playing well. I got caught up in that for a while but I concluded it didn't come close to working. It was kind of a mass delusion.

All the coaches thought the players loved them despite how badly they treated them, and all the players were doing were putting up with the coach so they could play football. Instead of loving and revering the coach, they couldn't stand im and were disgusted with him but they wanted to play football. They wanted the fellowship, they wanted the association, they wanted the excitement, and only put up with the bullying because they had to. Most played football in spite of the coach.

By the time I left Cal I had decided that if you taught people to play the game better, that was real coaching -- being a teacher rather than a thug."

Sunday, March 15, 2009

"The thing that's jumped out about Larry is his ability to keep his motor at a high level. You hear the old term about players taking plays off. Well, he's a coach that doesn't take plays off. He continuously challenges the players to get better. He's never satisfied."

Saturday, March 14, 2009

NPR has a good piece today on Coach K and his upbringing in inner-city Chicago where his "father was an elevator operator and his mother cleaned offices to make sure her sons had everything they needed. "

Coach Krzyzewski called his belated decision to attend the U.S. Military Academy and play for Bobby Knight a "critical" turning point for his life.

At first, Coach K turned down Coach Knight's offer to play at West Point. But his parents felt it was the wrong move and talked about it -- in their native Polish -- for two weeks.

"I'd just hear it and finally I said, 'OK, I'll go.' And we let Coach Knight know, and — I don't know how I got in at that time, but I did," Krzyzewski recalls. "That was the most critical decision for me becoming who I am."

Bob Knight, who would later gain fame at Indiana University, was his coach at Army. It was also Knight who hired Krzyzewski to be his graduate assistant at Indiana. Later on, Knight recommended his former player for a coaching job at West Point, and then at Duke in 1980.

Now in his 30th season at Duke, Coach K's first few seasons were rough as he "taught his team to play man-to-man defense, rather than relying on the zone defense" and recruited "the kind of players he wanted." [In 1982, Duke went 10-17; in '83 the Devils were 11-17.]

"My first year at Duke was the hardest year for any of us," says Jay Bilas, who played for Coach K from 1983-86, "because there was a lot of talk that Coach K was going to get fired."

"I think if Coach K had that start in his career now, he wouldn't have made it," Bilas says. "I think the microwave culture we've got now, where coaches are fired after a couple of years, [in] a few years he wouldn't have survived — and look what everybody would have missed."

Jackson, who leads the W's in points, assists and minutes, "says his new-and-improved physique is behind his sustained surge, and he's giving credit to the Warriors' strength and conditioning gurus Mark Grabow and John Murray."

It was Murray who pointed out that Jackson's lack of strength was causing him to get pushed around without getting his share of foul calls, so the nine-year veteran hit the weight room to bulk up. Jackson now lifts for 30 to 40 minutes after every Warriors shootaround to jump start his game-day routine. He's also using meal-replacement shakes to boost nutrition.

The added strength is helping Jackson get "in better spots for shots and rebounds and figuring out how to hold his position down low." It's also helped his stamina.

"This is the most I've lifted and the most I've been in the weight room my whole career, and it's starting to pay off," says Jackson. "I was thinking that I didn't need it, but as I see now, it's the most I've ever weighed in my life and I still have my speed, so it's definitely helped my game a lot."

Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim was asked if he was surprised when West Virginia didn't try to press his team the night after the Orange's six OT game against UConn, which SU won (at 1:22 a.m.).

“I’m not surprised a team that’s well coached and is a really, really good team that never presses, doesn’t press,” Boeheim said. “That would surprise me if they did. If you’ve seen us play, we’re pretty good against pressure. So that has sometimes given us baskets. Tomorrow night we will be pressed for 40 minutes because that’s what Louisville does. But I would never expect a great coach to try to do something his team doesn’t do.”

Though both are outstanding professional tennis players, Andy Roddick and James Blake (who have 37 titles between them) "have taken a radically different approach when it comes to the voice in their ears."

Over nine years, Roddick's "engaged no less than seven coaches on a part- or full-time basis. Blake, who spent two years at Harvard before jumping to the pros in 1999, has had one."

In fact, the 29-year-old Blake has had the same coach since he was 11 years old.

"I've always said about tennis, it's a very individual sport," 13th-ranked Blake said in a conference call last month. "What works for one will never work for another. For me, I would not be nearly as successful with someone that didn't know me as a person, and know my strengths and weaknesses on the court. I credit him with making me the best player I can possibly be, and absolutely maximizing my potential. We are going to be friends for life, that's not even a question."

According to this article, "Blake is much more the exception than the rule. Most players switch coaches throughout their playing days as priorities change and relationships become stale."

Unlike Blake (at right in photo above), Roddick, 26, "likes to pick the brain of some of game's best minds, and it has often paid quick dividends."

"There's been a couple of times in my career where it's really jump-started my playing just by having a fresh voice," Roddick says. The downside is the getting-to-know-you process, along with periods of transition. "Obviously, continuity is a good thing, and there have certainly been times where I've been without someone or in transition and you're just kind of trying to make due."